Google Ngram Trends:

Cicero, Tacitus, Sallust, Plutarch, Aristotle and Shakespeare

Author
Affiliation

Chihiro Kariya, PhD

Kanazawa University

Published

Sun, 20, Jul, 2025

Modified

Fri, 7, Nov, 2025

This page was created to test the functionality of the R package ngramr. The ngramr package is very flexible in handling the Google Books Ngram API’s capability of returning multiple words at once, allowing users to display the results of multiple search terms in a single figure.

words <- c("Cicero", "Tacitus", "Sallust","Plutarch", "Aristotle", "Shakespeare", "Milton")

df <- map_dfr(words, ~ngram(.x, corpus = "eng_gb_2019", year_start = 1500, year_end = 2020))

df |> 
  ggplot(aes(x = Year, y = Frequency, color = Phrase)) +
  geom_line() +
  scale_color_paletteer_d("ggthemr::solarized") +
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(legend.position = "bottom") +
  labs(title = "Google Ngram Trends", y = "Frequency (%)", x = "")